It was billed as the March for the Alternative: Jobs, Growth, Justice. But Saturday's display of gentle, good-natured anger in Hyde Park (let's ignore the breakaway Piccadilly faction) never got much beyond sloganising about cutting less and taxing the rich more.

Yet in one of the short agitprop videos submitted for the event's competition a chap called Steve Price gave his audience what could prove the germ of an idea that might resonate better with a cuts-agnostic public than smashed windows in the West End: mockery. I'll come back to that.

A lack of well-honed alternatives was unavoidable in that huge arena on a blustery spring day. The march was an emotional gesture, an act of dignified dissent from the coalition's austere economic doctrine, not a strategy. Without one, declared Tory snipers, Ed Miliband had no right even to attend the event.

Wrong and wrong again. Labour and the Trades Union Congress leadership do have a strategy for dealing with the deficit. They had it before the general election, though Gordon Brown wouldn't let Alistair Darling talk about it much. Careful listeners in Hyde Park could catch snatches of it from some platform speakers, members of what I enjoy calling the "reality-based community".

What it amounts to is an unheroic "not so fast" to the pace of tax rises and spending cuts. Miliband and TUC moderates said as much. "No cuts at all, just tax the rich", countered the Public and Commercial Services Union's Mark Serwotka, but Saturday's Guardian/ICM poll showed the limits of that appeal. A YouGov poll on the same day showed 52% supporting the TUC in "opposing public sector spending cuts" – with 31% disagreeing. But ICM's sample broke it down a different way: 35% think the cuts go too far, 28% say they strike the right balance and 29% want even more blood on the Treasury carpet.

Not much of a mandate there for mass strikes against the cuts, let alone to protect public sector pensions, which can look pretty good to outsiders, even at the thin-cat end. So the TUC must act more subtly if it wants to nourish the sympathy and support of the battered British electorate.

It should argue that a squeeze that kills off fragile confidence and growth prospects is self-defeating – as Ireland is demonstrating – and that redundancy plus dole money is expensive. Even featherbrained credit rating agencies and bond markets, asleep on the job in the boom, will eventually get the point.

Voters, I suspect, know they are dealing with more than coalition obduracy or the legacy of Brown's reluctance to take away the City's punch bowl while the party was still going strong before the crash. So they will judge George Osborne by what he does to secure our collective economic future, not by cuts to SureStart and library provision, however painful. More demos and rallies? Of course. More opinion polls and campaigns? Yes. More righteous anger at shortsighted folly and unfairness? Bring it on. The impact of cuts will be eloquent too.

It may be that the chancellor's short sharp medicine and the "budget for growth" will do the trick. Keynes and history suggest otherwise. But until he does "rebalance the economy", we are going to need those fat-cat bankers and FTSE 100 firms: the top 1% of firms and taxpayers pay over half the NHS bill. But we needn't make them feel too comfy, let alone that they deserve those bonuses. That's where Price's mini-video points the way. It showed a Hooray Henry dad, Pimms in hand, explaining to his eight-year-old daughter why she would lose her pocket money and have to sweep chimneys.

In scene two the tot, by now soot-covered, hands over her day's wages to be told, "Sorry, but mummy and daddy have decided to let you go. Close the door behind you." Grotesque? Unfair? Of course, but so is Barclays' chief executive Bob Diamond's bonus and Phil (Topshop) Green's nimble tax avoidance. Let's cheer ourselves up by laughing at them.